Why is it that when there's money in my wallet, all shiny and ready and expressly put there for the purpose of buying clothes, everything on the shelves is either ridiculously priced or there's nothing in any store that I can squeeze over my ginormous cranium/arms/belly/patootie? Conversely, when I don't have any money, everything fits and looks great and is on sale. Every stinking time.


Maybe it's just me, but I have noticed that this happens every single time I go shopping. We generally buy clothes around September and February when they're at their lowest on the clearance rack (yeah, I'm cheap), so we budget for a decent amount of money there, and we also sometimes budget to replace certain things; for instance, I got some new walking pants last month because my old ones had lost all their stretch and I spent my entire walk pulling them up and then removing the wedgie I had just caused.


There isn't always a lot of choice on the clearance racks so I sometimes end up with clothes that aren't my favorite, but will be just fine. I am on the tall side and I have broad shoulders along with a plentiful supply of extra padding, so many times I have trouble with finding only shirts that have arms the size of a four-year-old or I have to wade through oceans of short shorts in size 5X to find anything decent. There is the happy occasion when something really cool ends up on the clearance rack and it's in my size and a good color for me, but not often enough that it's not an extremely exciting moment for me.


I have been known to shout, "Huzzah!" What of it?


Anyway, we went to Santa Fe to look (mind you, just look) at these two stores that we had heard were awesome. They were. Thus, I found a billion things that I loved. All of them expensive and miles from being in my budget (can't do the regularly-priced items if I'm buying more than one thing...it's pretty much against my moral code). Ugh.


I'm still annoyed today. I don't like a lot of clothing stores as much as I liked that one. They had all sizes, from super tiny to shirts that were actually one size fits all (really!), and their prices, while being high, were quite a bit lower than the other stores on the SF Plaza (so it was basically like their version of Wal-Mart).


Why am I annoyed? Because I know that the next time I have money to buy clothes, I'm going to go back and they won't have anything that I like, or they will have reduced all of the armholes on all of their shirts and purchased all of their fashionable skirts in size two, which means that the only thing left for me will be an massive rack of muumuus in the back corner. Then I'll be sad and be forced to walk over to the Häagen-Dazs to drown my sorrows, and that's not going to help the clothes situation, either. Argh.